My Research

My academic research centers primarily around the various ways that racial and ethnic identity affect our communicative interactions in a variety of contexts. I have studied communication in interracial relationships (my Master's thesis), the lived experiences of first-generation Mexican American community college students who live in a border community (my first publication of my own research in a journal), interracial and interethnic conflict, the communicative experiences of African American students on a university campus where they make up 2.9% of the student population, whiteness in popular films, and the fandom associated with Tyler Perry.

Most recently, I spent a year and a half working on my dissertation on white privilege. For this research project, I was primarily interested in how pedagogy on white privilege would impact college students' understandings of racism, intersectionality, and white privilege. I designed an intensive three-day seminar for college undergraduates to explore these topics and assess their knowledge/understandings before, during, and after participating in the seminar. This research project impacted my life in profound ways and helped me to realize my desire to share this knowledge I have gained from my academic and research experiences about whiteness and white privilege, and to encourage those who identify (or are identified) as white to understand, confront, and disrupt white privilege in their daily lives.

If you are interested in reading part (or all) of my dissertation, click here.

I look forward to continuing my research interests, while also working to make academic research more accessible and applicable to non-academicians, as well.